Noobing it since forevrrrrr

Tag: culture

Documenting what I’ve built so far. I don’t have the $$ to host these yet, so, I’ll post pics for now.

The Nomurica Constant International Film Fest

I built this web app to counter the winner-takes-all effect in popular culture. American culture saturates every last bit of our environment, and I felt this buried great works from the rest of the world six feet under. So, I took the IMDB database, banned all films from America and most of the West, and let my algorithm randomly pick ten films from around the world, scrape YouTube for their trailers, and post them on a webpage.

I built this in Flask, and the code is shoddy because I made this before I learnt more about MVC. I know better now, and I’ll rebuild it in Django when I have the time. This experience also let me understand how much faster it is to use PostgreSQL over SQLite3.

I think, even considering its many faults right now, it looks like significantly effective proof-of-concept that it is more than possible to remedy the winner-takes-all effect, and consequently, cultural hegemony.

Artpithets

I built this app as an exercise in both language and code. Essentially, I constructed a way to randomly concatenate several lists of strings so that they always turn out grammatically correct. The background slowly segues from one colour to another, and the text also changes every so often.

It’s also built in Flask.

A social media site

I’ve also built, in Flask, a social media site where people log in and out and share events. It’s not time to show it publicly yet but, working on user accounts gave me an idea of how insecure a site can be when built by a beginner without any knowledge of SQL sanitisation.

It was this site that made me finally pick up Django, which I hoped would solve my security issues for me. While learning Django, I found out about Django-allauth, and the way it uses ORMs, which was heartening.

Last bit

I’ve learnt a lot. I can make web apps/websites in Flask, and I’m beginning to feel my way into Django.

I read that a lot of compsci grads can’t even code fizzbuzz. Does this mean I’m good enough for a job? I don’t know. I still don’t have the confidence to apply. I wish someone would tell me. It’s easy to say, hey, you can just ask. But more often than not, people tell me, yeah, ask me any time, and then they are way too busy to reply to me every time I ask. And online forums can be untowardly harsh to beginners, which is hardly good for anyone with anxiety issues.

I also wish I’d had teachers who guided me. But, I suppose, I go it alone as usual, and hope for the best. It’s really slow. But I guess, I’m getting somewhere?